McKinsey on Africa | Africa's path to growth: Sector by sector

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» Sizing Africa's business opportunities
Strong prospects await global companies that invest in the continent’s consumer, agricultural, natural-resource, and infrastructure sectors.

Africa’s economic growth is creating substantial new business opportunities that multinational companies often overlook. New projections from the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) show at least four categories that together could be worth $2.6 trillion in annual revenues by 2020 (exhibit). In Lions on the move: The progress and potential of African economies, MGI reviews the prospects of the continent’s consumer-facing sectors (retailing, telecommunications, and banking, among others), agriculture, natural resources, and infrastructure.

» Can Africa continue to grow?
A panel of regional business leaders discusses its prospects.

» Checking Africa’s vital signs
A familiarity with Africa’s demographics, economics, and business climate is essential to considering future trajectories of growth.

» What’s driving Africa’s growth
The rate of return on foreign investment is higher in Africa than in any other developing region. Global executives and investors must pay heed.

» Africa’s path to growth: Sector by sector
The continent’s growth story isn’t entirely about the extractive industries. Seven articles examine the future of a wide range of sectors.

» Fulfilling the promise of sub-Saharan Africa
The region has already made big strides below the radar. It now stands to become the developing world’s next great success story.

» A seismic shift in South Africa’s consumer landscape
McKinsey research underlines both the distinctiveness of black shoppers’ needs and the distance retailers must still go to serve them.

» Picking products for Africa’s growing consumer markets
The rapid expansion of Africa’s consumer class should convince companies to consider entering a region that many have avoided in the past.

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The continent’s growth story isn’t entirely about the extractive industries. Seven articles examine the future of a wide range of sectors.

Although Africa’s growth prospects are bright, they differ not only country by country but also sector by sector. In these articles, we examine the possibilities for seven of them: agriculture, banking, consumer goods, infrastructure, mining, oil and gas, and telecommunications. Perhaps the most fundamental point is that Africa’s growth story is hardly limited to the extractive industries. As many as 200 million Africans will enter the consumer goods market by 2015. Banking and telecommunications are growing rapidly too, and infrastructure expenditures are rising significantly faster in Africa than in the world as a whole. Not that the growth of the extractive industries won’t be impressive. The continent has more than one-quarter of the world’s arable land. Eleven of its countries rank among the top ten sources for at least one major mineral. Africa will produce 13 percent of global oil by 2015, up from 9 percent in 1998. For many companies, this is a future worth investing in.

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